Whidden slowed the boat to scan the banks. Nobody had appeared out of the house. Lucius had told them about Addison Burdett, and now they saw across the river an old skiff with a scabby outboard motor tied up to the mangroves, which formed a thin wall between the current and the salt prairie of white marl muck, hard scrub, and bitter grasses. They crossed the river and eased the Belle up alongside. Except for bilge water and empty paint cans, the boat was empty, yet all agreed that Burdett had not gone ashore. There was no destination here, nothing but wasteland of salt prairie and dead marl.
Harden rerigged the skiff’s bow line to the branches. “Whoever tied her up as poor as this never cared whether she drifted off or not. This boat was towed across the river so nobody could escape off of the Bend.” Grumpy with uneasiness, he straightened, the line still in his hand, and gazed back across the water at the silent house. “Maybe like they took him someplace else,” he said.
Lucius thought, Or he is in the river. Whidden must have considered this, too, for he added quietly, “Well, I reckon they ain’t harmed him, Mister Colonel, or they wouldn’t leave his boat where somebody who came lookin for him would see her.” Whidden’s instinct was to wait awhile for someone to appear before they went ashore across the river. “If them boys catch us snoopin at the house, they might shoot first and ask their questions after, especially if they been drinkin.” He looked around some more. “I want to sniff things out a little, keep my distance, till I get the feel of it.” When Sally asked him what that meant, Whidden was unable to explain, but Lucius thought he knew. He felt the same.
Lucius sat cross-legged on the bow, staring at the shining house across broad soft swirls of current. At one time he had known every eddy and hole in this stretch of the river, on those long-ago slow summer days when a deft hook might land half a hundred fish of a half dozen species in an afternoon, more than enough to feed the field hands in the harvest. In later years, as a commercial fisherman, he and his partner—usually Hoad Storter, sometimes Lee Harden—might come upriver to draw fresh water from the cistern, which Fred Dyer had built to hold 10,000 gallons. They would scour the overgrowth for the last guavas and alligator pears and slip through the old cane fields to the salt ground known as Watson Prairie to shoot one or two young ibis for their supper. The grass was low and sparse on that marl ground, which held fresh puddles where the wild creatures could come get their water. Papa had burned his prairie every year to keep its small ponds open for the ducks and rails, ibis and deer. Occasionally they took a black bear or a panther.
Behind him, the muted voices rose and fell as the wind shifted. Andy was pointing down the river. From here, he was saying, they could probably see that bar off the north bank where some fisherman come across what was left of a dead colored man, in that last summer before all hell broke loose in that black October. “The way Ed Watson used his field hands, people said, was like something out of the old century. Replaced a hand like you replaced a horse.”
They were all gazing at the house. “Back in the early days,” Whidden told his wife, “an old nigra got his sleeve caught in a cane presser. He lost his arm and he bled and bled, all over everything. Mister Watson couldn’t take the time to run him to Key West, not in the harvest. Anyways, it wouldn’t do no good, he said, that boy is done for. The women took him to the house, laid him down in the front room, but they couldn’t stop it, he just bled to death while he lay there watchin ’em. Couldn’t never get that stain up, couldn’t never paint it out, now ain’t that something? Cause sooner or later that blood rose through the paint. Still there today! You can go through that door and see it for yourself!
“That nigra blood was like a spell on that old house. After Watson’s death, folks would go ashore and point to it—’See there? That’s a murder victim’s blood!’ Well, it weren’t no such a thing! It were only the lifeblood of that poor feller whose arm got overtook by that machine!”
My God, Lucius thought, they have heard that tale so often, and still they are reciting it, like myth or scripture—not that the story was untrue. He recalled Sybil Dyer hurrying her Lucy away from the dreadful sight of so much blood, and Papa mopping his brow by the shed, knowing how that dying black man would come back to haunt him.
“The only way that blood is going to come out is burn it out.” Lucius called this from the bow, to close the story in the traditional way in which local people had always closed it. Not wishing to eavesdrop, he came back astern, inquiring if anyone recalled the name of the black man who had gone to Pavilion Key to report the murders. He vaguely recalled the name “Sip Linsy,” but he needed confirmation.